A Country Oasis at the Crazy Horse

The dance floor of the Crazy Horse Steak House resembles a scene from the musical “Oklahoma!”--men in cowboy hats do the two-step with partners clad in whirling skirts and white cowboy boots.

Customers at the Santa Ana country music nightspot dress for the occasion. The variety of plaids on their cowboy shirts could be matched only at a Scottish meeting of the clans. Although a few women wear knit dresses and some men sport T-shirts or jackets and slacks, fringed suede vests, jeans, boots and cowboy hats are de rigueur.

Outside the club, designed like an old Western saloon with a neon bucking bronco lending a modern touch, a wooden Indian has been bolted to the wall in case revelers carried away by firewater are tempted to carry it away.

A World Away

Inside the Crazy Horse you feel prairies away from the Costa Mesa Freeway and the glitzy new hotels and office buildings that surround it. Local groups such as Western Union Band, Touch of Country and American Made Band perform on a stage backed by a red velvet curtain as customers sashay around the dance floor, drink beer from the bottle and holler an occasional “Yee-haw!”

Above the bar and dance floor, mechanized plaster of Paris Old West figures perch on two lofts, resembling a mobile wax museum.

Amid bales of straw, Pony Express saddles and mounted chickens and roosters, a mechanized squaw washes clothes in a tub, another rocks in a chair “smoking” a corncob pipe and one figure bobs its head up and down from the rim of a whiskey barrel.

Below the lofts, walls covered with rustic floral wallpaper display photos of performers who have appeared at the Crazy Horse.

Most nights country groups play, and the cover charge is $1 Tuesday through Thursday and $2 on weekends. Dance instructors give free lessons in the two-step, 10-step and swing on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Sunday nights there is no live entertainment and no admission charge.

Monday Performers

Mondays, performers like Ray Charles, Rita Coolidge and Helen Reddy give concerts and reserved seats are $10 to $25.

Those who work up an appetite dancing, or who prefer Western food to Western music, eat hearty meals of chicken-fried steak and barbecued pork ribs in the adjoining restaurant. The wine list is small but varied, ranging from a Sutter Home white Zinfandel for $9.50 to a Chateau Lafitte Rothschild at $170.

The nightclub has a full bar, but beer seems the drink of preference. Drinks are served by barmaids in red dresses with puffed sleeves and flouncy miniskirts, with black garters trimmed with red bows over their dark stockings.

Weekends the bar gets crowded and empty tables are rare.

Customers are country music fans from all walks of life, general manager Steve Schrader said, but business is especially brisk when the rodeo comes to town.

The Crazy Horse Steak House is at 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana; (714) 549-1512. You must be 21 or older to enter, except for concerts.